Wednesday, August 28, 2013
Monday, August 26, 2013
"Speaking Parts" Excerpt From Technorotica and Rude Mechanicals
Here's a teasing taste from my ebook, Rude Mechanicals, and from the dead-trees book Technorotica (which is Rude Mechanicals: Technorotica plus Better Than The Real Thing: Technorotica): a bit from the novella "Speaking Parts."
Tourmaline and onyx. Silver and gold. A masterpiece watch set in a crystal sphere, the iris a mandala of glowing gold. Her blinks were a camera shutter’s, as imagined by the archetypal Victorian engineer but built by surgical perfection not found anywhere in Pell’s knowledge. The woman’s left eye was jeweled and precise, clicking softly as the woman looked around the gallery, as if the engineers who’d removed her original wet, gray-lensed ball had orchestrated a kind of music to go with their marvelous creation: a background tempo of perfect watch movements to accompany whatever she saw through their marvelous and finely crafted sight. Click, click, click.
An eye like that should have been in a museum, not mounted in a socket of simple human skin and bone, Pell had thought. It should have been in some other gallery, some better gallery, allowed only to look out at, to see other magnificent creations of skilled hands. Jare’s splashes of reds and blues, his shallow paintings were an insult to the real artistry of the woman’s eye.
That’s what Pell thought, at first, seeing Arc – but only seeing Arc’s perfect, mechanical eye.
Pell didn’t like to remember first seeing her that way – through the technology in her face. But it felt, to her, like it had its own kind of ironic perfection to deny it. So Pell lived with the biting truth that she didn’t, at first, see Arc – for her eye.
But later, right after she got momentarily lost in the beauty of Arc’s implant, the woman looked at Pell with her real eye, the gray, penetrating right one – and Pell forgot about the tourmaline, onyx, silver and gold machine.
She had finally seen Arc, herself – the woman, and not the simple, mechanical part. Next to her, the eye was cheap junk: a collection of metal, old rocks, and wires.
* * * *
She wasn’t Arc at first. She began as just the woman with the perfectly created eye. Then she was the beautiful woman. Then she was the woman where she didn’t belong. Seeing her eye, then seeing her, Pell lastly saw her as oil, the kind of oil you’d see pooling in the street, that had somehow managed to make its way into a glass of wine. Agreed, it was cheap red wine – something out of a box and not even a bottle, but, still – she was oil. She didn’t belong and that was obvious, despite the cheapness of the gallery. She could tell, cataloging her bashed and scuffed boots, noting her threadbare jeans, her torn T-shirt, that amid clean jeans and washed (and too black) turtlenecks, she was a discordant tone among the harmonious poseurs in Jare’s tiny South of Market studio.
The woman was aware of her discrepancy. She wandered the tiny gallery with a very large plastic tumbler of vin very ordinare, stopping only once in a while to look at one of Jare’s paintings.
Holding her wine tight enough to gently fracture the cheap plastic with cloudy stress lines, Pell watched her, stared at the tall – all legs and angles, broad and strong – woman with the artificial eye. She tried not to watch her too closely or too intently, sure that if she let slip her fascination she’d scare her off – or worse, bring on an indifferent examination of Pell. Through a sad ballet of a slightly curved lip and a stare that was nothing more than a glance of the eyes, the woman would see Pell but wouldn’t – and that would be an icy needle in Pell’s heart.
Pell had already taken too many risks that night. She already felt like she’d stepped off the edge and had yet to hit the hard reality of the ground. Traps and tigers, beasts and pitfalls for the unwary loomed all around Pell. She moved through her days with a careful caution, delicately testing the ice in front of her, wary of almost-invisible, murky lines of fault. She knew they were there, she’d felt the sudden falling of knowing she’d stepped too far, moved too quickly, over something that had proven, by intent or accident, not to be there. Pell didn’t push on the surface, didn’t put all her weight, or herself, on anything.
But then everything changed. She’d seen Arc and her eye.
The plastic cup chimed once, then collapsed in on itself. Turning first into a squashed oval, the glass cracked, splintered, then folded, the white seams of stress turning into sharp fissures of breakage. The red, freed of its cheap plastic prison, tumbled, cascaded out and down onto her.
Pell had worn something she knew wouldn’t fit with the rest of the crowd. The official color of San Francisco, she knew, would fill the place with charcoal and soot, midnight and ebony. White, she’d decided, would pull some of their eyes to her, make her stand out – absence of color being alone in a room full of people dressed in all colors, combined.
"Looks good on you."
The shock of the wine on her white blouse tumbled through Pell as an avalanche of warmth flowed to her face. The decision to wear white that night had come from a different part of herself, a part that had surprised her. Now she was furiously chastising that tiny voice, that fashion terrorist who had chosen the blouse over other, blacker ones.
And so Pell responded, "Not as good as you would" to the tall, leggy, broad shouldered girl with the artificial eye. Which was beautiful, but not as beautiful as the rest of her.
* * * *
Pell’s reason for being at the gallery was Jare. Although she could never wrap her perceptions around the gaunt boy’s paintings, she still came when he asked. Jare, Pell, Fallon, Rasp and Jest. They weren’t close – but then foxhole buddies aren’t always. They weren’t in combat, but they could be. All it would take would be one computer talking to another – no stable job history, thus conscription.
All it took were two computers, passing pieces of information back and forth. Till that happened, they hid and watched the possibility of a real foxhole death in a hot, sweaty part of Central America fly by.
Foxhole buddies. It was Jare’s term – some fleck of trivia that’d hung around him. They didn’t have an official name for their tiny society of slowly (and in some cases not too slowly) starving artists, but Pell was sure that Jare would smile at his trivial term being immortalized among a band of too-mortal kids.
That was Jare. While the rest of them tried to focus on pulling their paintings (Pell, Jare, and Rasp), music (Jest), and sculpture (Fallon) as high as they could, there was something else about Jare – something, like his paintings, that refused to be understood. His techniques were simple enough, broad strokes of brilliant color on soot-black canvas, but his reasons were more convoluted.
Or maybe, Pell had thought earlier that evening (before turning a white blouse red and seeing the woman with the artificial eye for the first time) both man and his work were simple: broad, bold statements designed to do nothing but catch attention. He was like his paintings, a grab for any kind of attention – an explanation too simple to be easily seen.
In the tiny bathroom, Pell tried to get the wine out of her blouse. Contradictory old wives’ tails: first she tried cold, then hot water. The sink ran pink and so, soon, did her blouse.
The woman with the eye stood outside the door, a surprisingly subtle smile on her large mouth. Every once and a while she’d say something, as if throwing a bantering line to the shy girl inside to keep her from drowning in embarrassment.
"Who’s he foolin? I can do better crap than this with a brush up my ass.”
"You should see this chick’s dress. Looks like her momma’s – and momma didn’t know how to dress, either.”
"Too many earrings, faggot. What year do you think this is?
"Hey, girl. Get out here with that shirt. It’s better looking than this fucking stuff on the walls."
Cold water on her hands, wine spiraling down the sink. Distantly, Pell was aware that her nipples were hard and tight – and not from the chill water. Down deep and inside, she was wet. It was a basic kind of primal moisture, one that comes even in the burning heat of humiliation. Finally, the blouse was less red than before. Planning to run to where she’d dropped her old leather coat to hide the stigmata of her clumsiness, her excitement in two hard brown points, she opened the door.
The tall woman smiled down at her, hot and strong. In one quick sweep of her eyes, Pell drank her tall length, strong shoulders, columnar legs. She was trapped, held fast between the hot eyes she knew must have been staring at her, pinning her straight to her embarrassment, and the presence of the woman.
Her eye, the eye, clicked a quick chime of precision – as if expanding its limits to encompass the totality of Pell. Pell did not mind her intense examination. It added, with a rush of feelings, to the quaking in her belly, the weakness in her knees.
"Gotta splash. Wait right here,” Arc said.
Of course she waited.
After a few hammering heartbeats, the door opened and she came out – butchly tucking her T-shirt back into her jeans – and Pell was again at the focus of her meticulously designed sight.
"You live anywhere close? I’m tired of this shit. You?"
"Down the block. Just on the corner," Pell said, trying hard not to smile too much.
The woman downed the small sample of red in her glass and, looking for a place to put it down, and not finding any, just dropped it with a sharp plastic clatter on the floor. "Show me. It can’t be worse than here. Too many fucking artists."
Saturday, August 24, 2013
Wednesday, August 21, 2013
Orphans From Love Without Gun Control
I always liked this story - so I thought I'd share it with you. "Orphans"
first appeared in Talebones Magazine and now, of course, is in my
science fiction/fantasy/horror collection, Love Without Gun Control ...
out in 'e' and paperback from the great Renaissance E Books.
Orphans
Outside
of Atlanta, after standing under the flickering fluorescent lights of a
sprawling truck stop for almost an hour, he was picked up by a heavy faced man
driving a ratting sixteen wheeler. Red hair an angry mop on his head,
brushy beard all wild and unkempt, the driver said “Glad for the company”
before they’d even pulled out onto the dark highway.
#
In a little town somewhere just beyond the Louisiana border, he was picked up by a middle-aged woman in a green station wagon, who seemed to delight in creating herself as the perfect housewife: housecoat, hair in curlers, kid’s seat in the back. She spent the first few miles prattling nervously, obviously just wanting companionship but frightened with herself for choosing the young hitchhiker to try and sate it. He listened, hypnotized by the landscape blurring by. Finally she asked, “Been on the road long?”
“Not long,” he said, wishing again that it had been someone else who’d picked him up, “just getting out. Meeting people.”
“That’s good,” she said, innocently. “Nothin’ worse than being alone.”
To that he just nodded, still staring out the window.
#
He’d never heard of a nut log, and would be damned if he was going to try some. But the salesman, Lou Phillips, was so insistent that -- before he was even aware of it -- he had some on the end of his fork.
“Now me, son,” Lou said, smiling broad and bright, “I ain’t a flincher. You take that shit there on the end of your fork. What’s the worse that could happen? It taste like crap -- but that ain’t gonna kill you, is it? But maybe it’s gonna be the best damned shit you ever tasted. Ain’t gonna know till it’s in your mouth, right?”
He didn’t answer, and instead stared at the tip of his fork, at the brown sticky mass. Before he was aware of it he was categorizing diseases, vectors and transmission rates. Closing his eyes, he breathed in, out, in and again, then put it into his mouth. The sweetness was almost alarming, and without conscious control he opened his eyes -- and stared into Lou’s sparking brown eyes. “See, that ain’t so bad! Fuck it, son -- life’s too short to be scared.”
A cup of coffee later, Lou confessed that he was a widower. His wife of twenty-six years having passed away that spring. “Some kind of virus got her. By the time she went to the damn doc it was she was thin as a rail. Didn’t last more than a month.”
Sipping hot, bitter -- with a touch of slightly turned cream, he hung his head down, mumbling, “Sorry” like it was his fault.
“I mean we all got to go, right? When it’s our turn. But what pisses me off is the shit those damned doctors put ya through. Pretend that they know it all when they don’t know shit. Tell ya what, kid, if I ever get something I’m just gonna drive out to the desert somewhere and just lay out there in the sun. Damn sight better chance then letting them touch ya.”
It seemed such a positive act that he smiled, despite himself -- masking it by sipping the foul coffee again and saying “Sometimes it isn’t that they don’t know -- it’s that it’s just not worth knowing.”
#
Another big truck -- this time cleaner, almost polished. Like a fighter plane, sporting a elegant pin-up on the driver’s side door. Haulin’ Ass, scrolled under a cheesecake girl with golden blond hair. The driver was gaunt, a narrow sketch of a man. Peppered hair and the ghostly scar of a hair lip.
They didn’t speak for many miles, then the driver said, unexpectedly, “What cha’ runnin’ from, man?”
His first reaction was so say, “nothing” but the word didn’t come. Was he running? When he thought about it, watching the double-yellow vanish under the windshield, the direction wasn’t right. “Not from, towards.”
“What cha’ goin’ to, then?”
He didn’t know. He did know, though, that he couldn’t stay in Atlanta. It was such a lonely place ... no, not right. It was where he discovered loneliness. A dusty little room and files -- at first just one or two then more. Some of them had faces, pictures charting their progress -- images to match the declining graphs. Aside from the wasting, he’d seen something else in those faces, the sunken eyes, the fallen features -- loneliness. In their worlds they’d been too few, not enough to matter ... to save.
He’d managed a rough smile, trying to put a comedic face over tragedy. “Just makin’ friends,” he said.
#
Texas was hot, ghostly heat hovering above the roadway. Sky too blue, too pure to be stared at for long. Sitting in a McDonald’s, slowly sipping a shake to avoid going out into the hot, dry, he struck up a brief conversation with a young couple. Too pressed, too clean. A few miles beyond, the air conditioner in their older car cranked up to full, they started to talk about Jesus.
He responded noncommittally, but soon their tone started to irritate him. Looking out at the hot land, he could too easily see the ghostly hopelessness, the abandonment he’d first seen in Atlanta overlaid on every face they passed. Maybe the harried father in the RV -- stricken with something that struck one on ten thousand. Maybe that old woman, all blue hair and cautious hand on the wheel -- catching something that would waste her, slowly, horribly but only affected one in a hundred thousand.
He listened, for a moment, about what they were saying -- instantly realizing that they were following a well-hewn grove. Something like Parkinson’s, a horrible inlaw to the more popular disease: a gradual wasting of the mind -- something affecting one in a million. He could too easily see them, parroting their beliefs till they had no more will, no more strength left to even move their lips.
At the next town he asked to be left off, dismissing their offer of finding him a shelter, a meal, but he did take the money they offered, more than anything to get them to leave.
#
Too many miles. Still in Texas but the weather had changed -- high, turbulent clouds casting deep shadows onto the flat land. Too many miles. Maybe that was it. A pressure. They all saw him the way they wanted to, a young man traveling. A bum, a threat, a homeless person, an object of pity, something to hate and blame. The pick-up truck full of teenagers, throwing a half-empty can of beer as they passed, the too-helpful families that desperately wanted his absolution.
So he told some of it to the bald man, the man in the jeans and stained tee-shirt. He knew he’d been picked up for rough trade, but didn’t care. He avoided his inquiring eyes and, at first, answered with only a few words, but as they drove and the driver’s interest became more and more obvious he found himself talking more, stringing together fact and fiction.
To “-- where are you headed?” he said, “Los Angeles, my mom’s in the hospital. Something wrong with her liver.”
To “-- that sounds pretty serious. What does her doctor say?” he said, “They know what it is, some kind of hepatitis variant. Rare, though, like one in a hundred thousand get it.”
To “-- at least they know what it is. They got all kinds of drugs and shit nowadays” he said, pausing “They know what it is, but not enough people get it. So they don’t make a cure, not cost effective. They call them ‘orphan diseases’ -- too rare to bother curing. She’s going to die.”
They rode in uncomfortable silence till the next town. This time he was asked to leave -- and he did, stepping out into the darkness of a cloud’s shadow. It had been the shortest trip he’d been on, but he felt lighter, less burdened. That it had only been part of the truth didn’t matter; he’d spoken enough of it to get someone to understand, if maybe just a little.
#
#
In a little town somewhere just beyond the Louisiana border, he was picked up by a middle-aged woman in a green station wagon, who seemed to delight in creating herself as the perfect housewife: housecoat, hair in curlers, kid’s seat in the back. She spent the first few miles prattling nervously, obviously just wanting companionship but frightened with herself for choosing the young hitchhiker to try and sate it. He listened, hypnotized by the landscape blurring by. Finally she asked, “Been on the road long?”
“Not long,” he said, wishing again that it had been someone else who’d picked him up, “just getting out. Meeting people.”
“That’s good,” she said, innocently. “Nothin’ worse than being alone.”
To that he just nodded, still staring out the window.
#
He’d never heard of a nut log, and would be damned if he was going to try some. But the salesman, Lou Phillips, was so insistent that -- before he was even aware of it -- he had some on the end of his fork.
“Now me, son,” Lou said, smiling broad and bright, “I ain’t a flincher. You take that shit there on the end of your fork. What’s the worse that could happen? It taste like crap -- but that ain’t gonna kill you, is it? But maybe it’s gonna be the best damned shit you ever tasted. Ain’t gonna know till it’s in your mouth, right?”
He didn’t answer, and instead stared at the tip of his fork, at the brown sticky mass. Before he was aware of it he was categorizing diseases, vectors and transmission rates. Closing his eyes, he breathed in, out, in and again, then put it into his mouth. The sweetness was almost alarming, and without conscious control he opened his eyes -- and stared into Lou’s sparking brown eyes. “See, that ain’t so bad! Fuck it, son -- life’s too short to be scared.”
A cup of coffee later, Lou confessed that he was a widower. His wife of twenty-six years having passed away that spring. “Some kind of virus got her. By the time she went to the damn doc it was she was thin as a rail. Didn’t last more than a month.”
Sipping hot, bitter -- with a touch of slightly turned cream, he hung his head down, mumbling, “Sorry” like it was his fault.
“I mean we all got to go, right? When it’s our turn. But what pisses me off is the shit those damned doctors put ya through. Pretend that they know it all when they don’t know shit. Tell ya what, kid, if I ever get something I’m just gonna drive out to the desert somewhere and just lay out there in the sun. Damn sight better chance then letting them touch ya.”
It seemed such a positive act that he smiled, despite himself -- masking it by sipping the foul coffee again and saying “Sometimes it isn’t that they don’t know -- it’s that it’s just not worth knowing.”
#
Another big truck -- this time cleaner, almost polished. Like a fighter plane, sporting a elegant pin-up on the driver’s side door. Haulin’ Ass, scrolled under a cheesecake girl with golden blond hair. The driver was gaunt, a narrow sketch of a man. Peppered hair and the ghostly scar of a hair lip.
They didn’t speak for many miles, then the driver said, unexpectedly, “What cha’ runnin’ from, man?”
His first reaction was so say, “nothing” but the word didn’t come. Was he running? When he thought about it, watching the double-yellow vanish under the windshield, the direction wasn’t right. “Not from, towards.”
“What cha’ goin’ to, then?”
He didn’t know. He did know, though, that he couldn’t stay in Atlanta. It was such a lonely place ... no, not right. It was where he discovered loneliness. A dusty little room and files -- at first just one or two then more. Some of them had faces, pictures charting their progress -- images to match the declining graphs. Aside from the wasting, he’d seen something else in those faces, the sunken eyes, the fallen features -- loneliness. In their worlds they’d been too few, not enough to matter ... to save.
He’d managed a rough smile, trying to put a comedic face over tragedy. “Just makin’ friends,” he said.
#
Texas was hot, ghostly heat hovering above the roadway. Sky too blue, too pure to be stared at for long. Sitting in a McDonald’s, slowly sipping a shake to avoid going out into the hot, dry, he struck up a brief conversation with a young couple. Too pressed, too clean. A few miles beyond, the air conditioner in their older car cranked up to full, they started to talk about Jesus.
He responded noncommittally, but soon their tone started to irritate him. Looking out at the hot land, he could too easily see the ghostly hopelessness, the abandonment he’d first seen in Atlanta overlaid on every face they passed. Maybe the harried father in the RV -- stricken with something that struck one on ten thousand. Maybe that old woman, all blue hair and cautious hand on the wheel -- catching something that would waste her, slowly, horribly but only affected one in a hundred thousand.
He listened, for a moment, about what they were saying -- instantly realizing that they were following a well-hewn grove. Something like Parkinson’s, a horrible inlaw to the more popular disease: a gradual wasting of the mind -- something affecting one in a million. He could too easily see them, parroting their beliefs till they had no more will, no more strength left to even move their lips.
At the next town he asked to be left off, dismissing their offer of finding him a shelter, a meal, but he did take the money they offered, more than anything to get them to leave.
#
Too many miles. Still in Texas but the weather had changed -- high, turbulent clouds casting deep shadows onto the flat land. Too many miles. Maybe that was it. A pressure. They all saw him the way they wanted to, a young man traveling. A bum, a threat, a homeless person, an object of pity, something to hate and blame. The pick-up truck full of teenagers, throwing a half-empty can of beer as they passed, the too-helpful families that desperately wanted his absolution.
So he told some of it to the bald man, the man in the jeans and stained tee-shirt. He knew he’d been picked up for rough trade, but didn’t care. He avoided his inquiring eyes and, at first, answered with only a few words, but as they drove and the driver’s interest became more and more obvious he found himself talking more, stringing together fact and fiction.
To “-- where are you headed?” he said, “Los Angeles, my mom’s in the hospital. Something wrong with her liver.”
To “-- that sounds pretty serious. What does her doctor say?” he said, “They know what it is, some kind of hepatitis variant. Rare, though, like one in a hundred thousand get it.”
To “-- at least they know what it is. They got all kinds of drugs and shit nowadays” he said, pausing “They know what it is, but not enough people get it. So they don’t make a cure, not cost effective. They call them ‘orphan diseases’ -- too rare to bother curing. She’s going to die.”
They rode in uncomfortable silence till the next town. This time he was asked to leave -- and he did, stepping out into the darkness of a cloud’s shadow. It had been the shortest trip he’d been on, but he felt lighter, less burdened. That it had only been part of the truth didn’t matter; he’d spoken enough of it to get someone to understand, if maybe just a little.
#
A long time and New Mexico. He felt the fever start as he walked down dusty streets, passing stores selling fake Indian art, plastic tomahawks. In a narrow alley, an old man with heavy features slept out the hot afternoon, a bronze-colored bottle by his hand.
He went into a dark bar and sat in the corner, feeling his core temperature rise, his skin shimmy with cold shakes. Taking deep breaths, he sipped a warm beer.
He remembered its pathology, its transmission rates, preferred vectors. He thought he’d have more time, and silently felt a heavy sadness at not being able to see the Pacific. It hadn’t been a real goal, but had begun to be a kind of benchmark, a saccharin epitaph.
He’d met some good people as he’d traveled from Atlanta, and felt sorry for them. But he also remembered those faces on all those files. It wasn’t virulent, but it did spread. Airborne was tough, but it could manage.
Too few to care about. Not enough to bother curing. It had almost been gone, at least to the Center for Disease Control. Exiled to its refrigerator, the vault. A rarity that claimed maybe a hundred, maybe two each year, almost just a memory. So rare that they’d passed judgment on it: extinction. It had been his job to destroy the samples, to consign the virus to a few sad cases scattered around the world.
The faces on those folders. Too few to care about. As the shivers began in earnest, he tried to think about them, to hold each and every one of them in his mind. Coldly told their wasn’t enough of them to bother, to care about, to cure.
Sipping his beer, feeling his strength drain, he hoped that now -- after all those miles he’d managed, those rides, those hands he’d shaken -- they wouldn’t be so alone.
Tuesday, August 20, 2013
Monday, August 19, 2013
Saturday, August 17, 2013
Friday, August 16, 2013
Thursday, August 15, 2013
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